1. Technical Field
The invention relates to printing. More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus and to a family of methods which reduces print times by using cluster printing, print load balancing and color and black-and-white page splitting.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior art attempts to reduce the time it takes to complete a print job have focused mainly on improving hardware performance. No prior art has attempted to reduce print times by dividing a print job across all available resources.
Typically, a large company will occupy a large office space with a multitude of computers and printers, all networked together. The multitude of printers is acquired to handle peak periods of printing so that there will not be a slow down. However, outside of peak periods there are many idle times in which many a printer will not be in use.
This makes for a highly inefficient scheme because, although there are available printers, a user cannot take advantage of all of them. A user typically selects a single printer and performs the entire print job on that printer. What is needed is a method and/or apparatus that would allow the use of many or all available printers to simultaneously perform a print job. In that way the total time to complete a single print job can be reduced.